Poland in a Colonial World Order

Adjustments and Aspirations, 1918–1939

Piotr Puchalski

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000479966
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

Poland in a Colonial World Order is a study of the interwar Polish state and empire building project in a changing world of empires, nation-states, dominions, protectorates, mandates, and colonies.

Drawing from a wide range of sources spanning two continents and five countries, Piotr Puchalski examines how Polish elites looked to expansion in South America and Africa as a solution to both real problems, such as industrial backwardness, and perceived issues, such as the supposed overrepresentation of Jews in "liberal professions." He charts how, in partnership with other European powers and international institutions such as the League of Nations, Polish leaders made attempts to channel emigration to South America, to establish direct trade with Africa, to expedite national minorities to far-away places, and to tap into colonial resources around the globe. Puchalski demonstrates the intersection between such national policies and larger processes taking place at the time, including the internationalist turn of colonialism and the global fascination with technocratic solutions.

Carefully researched, the volume is key reading for scholars and advanced students of twentieth-century European history.

1 Emigrants into colonists Channeling emigration to South America, 1918–1932

DOI: 10.4324/9781003131663-2

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Eastern Europe experienced a delayed technological transformation and increased population growth. The region’s industrial development, however, remained slow and sparse, which, combined with liberal immigration policies in the United States and countries in South America, encouraged masses of Polish peasants to search for economic opportunities across the Atlantic.¹ By 1880, seasonal migration from the Polish lands to the German lands and north-eastern France often became departures for the Americas. By 1914, according to one scholar’s estimate, three and a half million emigrants, including many Jews and Ukrainians, had left the Polish lands. Most traveled to the United States (c.1.9 million), but significant numbers also to Brazil (100,000)—where the abolition of slavery in 1888 and the desire to “whiten” the population intensified the demand for European farmers—and to Argentina (68,900). The Brazilian government, in particular, offered land to newcomers and financed their maritime transportation. As a result, large numbers of peasants from partitioned Poland settled in the southern Brazilian states of Paraná, Rio Grande do Sul, and Santa Catarina, while many others emigrated to the neighboring Argentinian region of Misiones.²

Not only economic opportunities enticed Polish peasants to leave. Lenny A. Ureña Valerio has demonstrated that, starting in the 1860s, Prussia’s anti-Polish economic, cultural, and religious measures in its eastern borderlands resulted in the uprooting of thousands of Polish peasants from their homes, with the purpose of increasing the number of German settlements. In response, patriots Edmund Sebastian Woś-Saporski and Antoni Zieliński rallied Poles from Upper Silesia to establish a “New Poland” free from foreign persecution in Paraná, whereas poet Maria Konopnicka promoted such emigration as the Polish nation’s mythological journey to the promised land. Woś-Saporski and Zieliński’s initiative enjoyed support from the Brazilian ruling class, which wished to use such stateless and Catholic (and therefore politically harmless) immigrants to create a “green belt” of farms to feed the city of Curitiba. Moreover, as the German settlement efforts in West Prussia and the Grand Duchy of Posen (Poznań) intensified in the 1880s, crossing the German border for seasonal employment became increasingly difficult for peasants from Galicia and the Kingdom of Poland, which encouraged Polish emigration to South America from all partitions.³

The so-called “Brazilian fever” affected all partitions equally, with the Kingdom of Poland experiencing an “outbreak” in 1890–1891 (45,000–50,000 emigrants) and autonomous Galicia in 1895–1896 (25,000 emigrants). However, whereas migration from the German and Russian partitions was at least partly absorbed by the industrial centers of the two empires, including the Ruhr area and Łódź, emigration from Galicia tended to be more agricultural and transatlantic due to the limited absorption capacity of the Habsburg territorial mosaic.⁴ Most importantly, the Galician preference for settlement-oriented emigration stemmed from the ways in which serfdom had been abolished, starting in the late 1840s, with peasants granted more personal freedom but only a limited amount of land. In addition, once the law of October 1, 1868 permitted the division of land, the emergence of “dwarf farms” was only a matter of time in a society where each male peasant inherited a fraction of his father’s land. By 1902, 79% of all Galician farms covered an area smaller than 0.05 km² and four-fifths of all Galician farmers could not support their families. At the same time, in the years 1871–1900, the population increase in Galicia was more than 44%.⁵ Considering this pathological socioeconomic situation, it should not come as a surprise that the greatest support for the idea of New Poland in Paraná came from political groups that operated in Galicia.

In this opening chapter, I examine Polish attempts to settle new areas in South America at the turn of the Great Depression and their origins in Galician ideas about peasants being able to resist assimilation in the pre-modern setting of Paraná.⁶ I argue that by the interwar period, Polish leaders became gradually convinced that such peripheral regions of South America could be converted into not only the Polish nation’s ethnoreligious reservoirs, but also into targets of “colonial” expansion where agrarian settlements could be established for trade purposes. Lastly, I demonstrate the ways in which the tectonic shift in the world order changed South America’s role in the global economy and forced Polish emigration policies to be adjusted after 1929.

1.1 Emigrants into colonists

In 1894, a medley of conservatives and farmers formed the Polish Commercial-Geographic Society (Polskie Towarzystwo Handlowo-Geograficzne, or PTHG) in Lwów (Lemberg), the capital of Galicia.⁷ The founders included lawyer Stanisław Głąbiński (1861–1941), landowner Stanisław Kłobukowski (1854–1917), and Catholic priest Józef Anusz. The PTHG promoted the creation of a global commercial network and geographical studies of countries and regions where emigration destinations and surplus markets might be found for “our [Polish] people.”⁸ Its program argued that emigration stemmed not only from land hunger and general destitution in the Polish lands, but also from people’s economic ignorance: “We do not know where resources are located, if they can be exploited for profit, processed, shipped.”⁹ While its aim was to limit emigration (wychodźtwo), the institution also encouraged emigrant communities to maintain economic links with the partitioned homeland. At the same time, a distinction was drawn between Polish “colonies” in North America and those in South America: the former would become commercial intermediaries and import Galician products such as footwear, while the latter would produce foodstuffs. Most importantly, the program stated that future Polish emigration should be directed to Paraná: the state’s agrarian nature made it a surplus market for industrial products, while its territorial expanse slowed assimilation and made the acquisition of land easier.¹⁰ In this manner, the PTHG drafted partitioned Poland’s first emigration program, adding an economic dimension to the idea of diaspora existing merely as a national refuge.

While economic arguments informed its agenda, the PTHG was also inspired by German “emigrationist” colonial ideology that promoted preindustrial settlement abroad.¹¹ Right-wingers associated with Roman Dmowski’s clandestine National League called for the concentration of Polish peasants in pre–modern spaces so that their national identity would be incubated. Looking across the Atlantic, Dmowski’s followers admired the pioneering efforts of their compatriots-in-the-making transplanted to Paraná and described their settlements as “colonies” that resisted assimilation. Likewise, according to Kazimierz Warchałowski (1872–1943), the channeling of emigration to southern Brazil made incubating the Polish-Catholic nature of peasants possible because of the weak pressure of modernity in a “sparsely populated country with a poor degree of education” and a “lower culture.”¹² Warchałowski contrasted Paraná with the melting pot of the United States, where economic opportunities and other modern temptations allegedly caused emigrants to lose their “nationality” (narodowość).¹³ Dmowski himself entertained fantasies about the wilderness of South America strengthening the Polish “element” and eliminating its weak offspring, but ultimately came to believe that emigration squandered national energies. Still, Warchałowski and Józef Siemiradzki (1858–1933) transplanted his Piast ideas to South America (Figure 1.1).¹⁴

Figure 1.1 Peasants from Poland in Paraná (1939). Intellectuals such as Warchałowski and Siemiradzki wished to preserve the “primordiality” of such settlers all the while claiming them for the Polish nation. Source: Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe, 3/1/0/16/264.

In 1920, looking back at the exodus from Galicia, the famous Polish sociologist Florian Znaniecki and his American collaborator William Thomas mentioned

radicals who believed in the possibility of making […] Paraná a Polish state and at the same time hoped to direct there some of the excess country proletariat, and thus indirectly to improve the condition of manor servants, which was particularly poor in the eastern part of the country.¹⁵

At the same time, however, Znaniecki and Thomas confirmed the traditional nature of Polish emigration to Paraná as

there was no idea of any break with the traditional system [… as] whole families were going. […] a very popular priest who favored the movement was awaiting them on the other side. […] the great majority imagined everything to be as in Poland, only better.¹⁶

In this way, Znaniecki and Thomas’s statement suggested that Polish “colonies,” or compact and isolated communities, could perhaps emerge in Paraná.

1.2 The Polish Colonial/Emigration Society

While the Galician “radicals” dreamed about Paraná becoming a Polish state, the leader of the actual New Poland preferred inner migration to transatlantic emigration. At the end of November 1918, Józef Piłsudski justified his plans for territorial annexations in the east by pointing to the alleged population saturation of Galicia and the Kingdom of Poland. He identified the taking of the Commonwealth’s historic eastern borderlands as “the crucial condition for resurrecting and developing the ruined [Polish] industry and the only place where the jobless masses can be employed, lest they are doomed to economic emigration.”¹⁷ His plan came true as the Treaty of Riga (March 1921) secured Polish rule in large swaths of the eastern borderlands, but the lands (re)conquered from Soviet Russia and Ukraine, which included the marshland of Polesie, could not absorb a large number of farmers. Furthermore, Poland’s constitution was passed in the same month, making emigration legal and de facto encouraging it.¹⁸ Indeed, as Grabski’s agrarian reform turned out to be a compromise with the landowning class, the countryside again became full of landless peasants eager to try their fortunes abroad. In the second half of the 1920s, moreover, Poland’s tariff war with the Weimar Republic deepened the economic crisis and forced members of other professions to look for economic opportunities abroad, too.¹⁹ In the years 1918–1930, almost a million people left Poland permanently, which, in terms of absolute numbers of emigrants, put the country in third place in Europe, only behind Italy and Britain.²⁰

Despite Piłsudski’s critical attitude, the large numbers still leaving the Baltic shores compelled the new state to secure its stakes in the process of emigration. In December 1918, the Polish Colonial Society (Polskie Towarzystwo Kolonialne, or PTK) was established by a group of former PTHG members that included those interested in creating a New Poland in Paraná, for example Siemiradzki and Anusz. The name of the institution was a reference to the Polish Emigration Society (Polskie Towarzystwo Emigracyjne, or PTE), which had been established in 1907/8 as an ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of abbreviations, acronyms, and metonyms
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Emigrants into colonists
• 2 Between periphery and core
• 3 European solidarity
• 4 Prometheus bound
• 5 Reforming the Wilsonian system
• 6 Useful abroad, unwanted at home
• 7 The last resort
• Afterword
• Bibliography
• Index